Waart, Edo de. 56 Wachmann, Eduard 56
Wolff, Auguste (Désiré Bernard)
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Wolff, Auguste (Désiré Bernard).French piano maker who became head of the firm of Pleyel, Wolff & Cie in 1855. See Pleyel (ii). Wolff, Charles (Johannes) de(b Onstwedde, 19 June 1932). Dutch organist and conductor. He studied the organ at the conservatory in Utrecht with Stoffel van Viegen and George Stam, at the Amsterdam Conservatory with Anthon van der Horst, and with Jeanne Demessieux in Paris. He also studied conducting in Hilversum (1956–9). His favoured organ repertory is, in addition to the organ works of J.S. Bach, contemporary Dutch and French music. He gave the premières of many Dutch organ works during the Schnitger festivals (1967–82) on the Schnitger organ in the Michaelskerk in Zwolle. Wolff has conducted various choirs, including the Nederlandse Bach Vereniging; he also directed annual performances of Bach's St Matthew Passion in Naarden (1965–83). As conductor of the Noordelijk PO in Groningen from 1964 to 1989, he gave many first performances in the Netherlands of modern works, notably by Messiaen. GERT OOST Wolff, Christian(b Nice, 8 March 1934). American composer of French birth. He moved to the USA in 1941 and became associated with Cage, Earle Brown and Feldman in New York in the early 1950s. Almost entirely self-taught as a composer, he studied classics at Harvard (BA, PhD), remaining there as a teacher until 1970, when he was appointed professor of classics and music at Dartmouth College. He became Strauss Professor of Music at Dartmouth in 1979. Wolff’s honours include an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and several commissions, notably those from West German Radio, the Concord String Quartet, the Wesleyan Singers and Ursula Oppens. Of the four ‘New York’ composers, Wolff has been most concerned to engage the performers in what he terms ‘parliamentary participation’, allowing them to mould the music, to act and to react to sounds in a manner that may be more or less free; the ‘monarchical authority’ of the conductor is eliminated. However, Wolff’s early compositions (c1950–57) are fully notated. The great importance of silence in these pieces derives aesthetically from Cage and technically from Webern, though 12-note and serial procedures are not used, nor is tonality. The music is stripped of a sense of goal or climax, and the repetitive use of pitch leads to a degree of stasis, accentuating interest in individual sounds rather than progressions. In the music of a second phase (1957–c1964) Wolff introduced performer choice within fixed time spans, and the most distinctive characteristic of his work, the technique of ‘cueing’, appeared during these years. This technique provides that the decisions of one performer are to some extent directed by the sounds of another, so that chains of action and reaction may be set up, requiring the musicians to be alert and flexible and lending the result an improvisatory quality. An early example of this kind of music was the Duo for Pianists II (1958), which gives each player a set of units of imprecisely notated material (durations are almost always determined, but other aspects may be strictly fixed, somewhat limited, or completely free). The choice of which unit to play next is more or less specifically ruled by what the performer has last heard; both pianists play continuously until an agreed period of time has elapsed. Wolff’s work after 1966 provides material and rules that are still less determinate, permitting a wide scope for improvisation. He has summarized the convictions behind such music under four headings: a composition must make possible the freedom and dignity of the performer; it should allow both concentration and release; no sound or noise is preferable to any other sound or noise; and the listeners should be as free as the players. From the early 1970s onwards Wolff’s works reflected an interest in political subjects and a desire, as he has said, ‘to stir up … a sense of the political conditions in which we live and of how these might be changed, in the direction of democratic socialism’. This theme is expressed through the use of texts addressing political issues, as in Wobbly Music (1975–6) and Changing the System (1972–3), and the use of material borrowed from traditional and contemporary labour and protest songs, as in the collection of works drawn from the song ‘Bread and Roses’ and Hay una mujer desaparecida (1979). A handful of recent compositions also draw upon particular works or techniques from western art music history, such as Aarau Songs (1994), which refers to Malleur me bat (ascribed to Ockeghem), or Percussionist Songs (1995), which borrows from a Josquin chanson. WORKS
BIBLIOGRAPHYF. Goebels: ‘Gestalt und Gestaltung musikalischer Grafik’, Melos, xxxix (1972), 23–34 M. Nyman: Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (New York, 1974, 2/1999) I. Jack: ‘Metamusik’, Music and Musicians, xxiii/3 (1974–5), 53 W. Zimmermann: ‘Christian Wolff’, Desert Plants: Conversations with 23 American Musicians (Vancouver, 1976) T. DeLio: Circumscribing the Open Universe: Essays on Cage, Feldman, Wolff, Ashley and Lucier (Washington, DC, 1984) D. Patterson: ‘Cage and Beyond: an Annotated Interview with Christian Wolff’, PNM, xxxii/2 (1994), 54–87 G. Gronemeyer and R. Oehlschlägel, eds.: Christian Wolff: Cues, Writings and Conversations (Cologne, 1988) [in Ger. and Eng.] WILLIAM BLAND/DAVID PATTERSON Directory: New%20Grove%20Dictionnary%20Of%20Music Download 14.95 Mb. Share with your friends:
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